A big hole in the desert (and in the story)

It’s been a bit disquieting to read the newspapers lately. Something big is possibly happening and little if any reporting is being done about it. Until yesterday.

Yesterday’s Washington Post ran an editorial Shock Waves from Syria:

Media accounts are beginning to converge on a report that Israel bombed a facility where it believed Syria was attempting to hatch its own nuclear weapons program with North Korea’s assistance. The Post’s Glenn Kessler reported that the strike came three days after a ship carrying material from North Korea docked at a Syrian port and delivered containers that Israel believes held nuclear materials. It’s not clear whether U.S. intelligence agencies concur with Israel’s conclusion, and independent experts have said that Syria lacks the resources for a credible nuclear weapons program.

The previous Glenn Kessler articles are here and here. The independent expert is apparently Joseph Cirincione who told Foreign Policy Passport

This story is nonsense. The Washington Post story should have been headlined “White House Officials Try to Push North Korea-Syria Connection.”

This is a political story, not a threat story. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from the run-up to war in Iraq. It is a sad commentary on how selective leaks from administration officials who have repeatedly misled the press are still treated as if they were absolute truth.Once again, this appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted “intelligence” to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

To which Kessler responded

All I can say in response is that I (and a number of uncredited colleagues) spent more than week knocking on doors of many agencies, seeking answers. No one tried to wave us off the story, including people who normally I thought would have tried their best to prevent us from printing it. I did note a number of caveats and explained that Syria never had much of a nuclear program. There appears to be a connection to the Israeli raid, which is now the subject of some of the tightest censorship in years.

To many “independent experts” the Bush administration is a bunch of out of control psychopaths looking for any excuse to go to war, whereas Kessler notes that even the more levelheaded members of the government believe that there’s something there. (Yes, there’s something missing in all this reporting, which I’ll get to later.)

Today there’s been a proliferation of American reporting on the topic. The Washington Post reported Israel, U.S. Shared Data On Suspected Nuclear Site and secrecy seems to be affecting every part of the story

The target of Israel’s attack was said to be in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. A Middle East expert who interviewed one of the pilots involved said they operated under such strict operational security that the airmen flying air cover for the attack aircraft did not know the details of the mission. The pilots who conducted the attack were briefed only after they were in the air, he said. Syrian authorities said there were no casualties.U.S. sources would discuss the Israeli intelligence, which included satellite imagery, only on condition of anonymity, and many details about the North Korean-Syrian connection remain unknown. The quality of the Israeli intelligence, the extent of North Korean assistance and the seriousness of the Syrian effort are uncertain, raising the possibility that North Korea was merely unloading items it no longer needed. Syria has actively pursued chemical weapons in the past but not nuclear arms — leaving some proliferation experts skeptical of the intelligence that prompted Israel’s attack.

The secrecy leads to this conclusion

“There is no question it was a major raid. It was an extremely important target,” said Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence officer at Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. “It came at a time the Israelis were very concerned about war with Syria and wanted to dampen down the prospects of war. The decision was taken despite their concerns it could produce a war. That decision reflects how important this target was to Israeli military planners.”

(Bruce Riedel, whom you might recall from yesterday’s news apparently wears many hats. Yesterday he “… was a negotiator in the 2000 Camp David effort.”)

The NY Times finally does a little more reporting on the topic with Bush Declines to Lift Veil of Secrecy Over Israeli Airstrike on Syria.

One former diplomat who has spoken to Israelis involved in the decision to attack said the airstrike was aimed at what Israel believed to be a Syrian nuclear program in cooperation with North Korea. The two countries already have a relationship that has concentrated on missile technology, which North Korea has long exported.The former diplomat, along with current and former American and Israeli officials, said a shipment of North Korean material labeled as cement arrived by ship three days before the attack. That material was transferred to a facility, which Israel bombed.

Current and former American and Israeli officials have said the Israelis gave the Bush administration advance notice of the attack.

While the article also finds plenty of sources skeptical about the nuclear angle, there is an acknowledgment that Israel did something out of the ordinary.

Charles Krauthammer has valiantly tried to tie all the loose ends together, in Middle East Volcano (or here).

Tensions are already extremely high because of Iran’s headlong rush to go nuclear. In fending off sanctions and possible military action, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has chosen a radically aggressive campaign to assemble, deploy, flaunt and partially activate Iran’s proxies in the Arab Middle East:

(1) Hamas launching rockets into Israeli towns and villages across the border from the Gaza Strip. Its intention is to invite an Israeli reaction, preferably a bloody and telegenic ground assault.

(2) Hezbollah heavily rearmed with Iranian rockets transshipped through Syria and preparing for the next round of fighting with Israel. The third Lebanon war, now inevitable, awaits only Tehran‘s order.

(3) Syria, Iran’s only Arab client state, building up forces across the Golan Heights frontier with Israel. And on Wednesday, yet another anti-Syrian member of Lebanon’s parliament was killed in a massive car bombing.

(4) The al-Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard training and equipping Shiite extremist militias in the use of the deadliest IEDs and rocketry against American and Iraqi troops. Iran is similarly helping the Taliban attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Why is Iran doing this? Because it has its eye on a single prize: the bomb. It needs a bit more time, knowing that once it goes nuclear, it becomes the regional superpower and Persian Gulf hegemon.

Krauthammer earlier in his essay wrote

Second, there are ominous implications for the Middle East. Syria has long had chemical weapons — on Monday, Jane’s Defence Weekly reported on an accident that killed dozens of Syrians and Iranians loading a nerve-gas warhead onto a Syrian missile — but Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Syria.

All the MSM reporting and speculation has centered around a Syrian nuclear program. But what if the raid is somehow related to that chemical explosion a few weeks ago? Maybe the latest shipment wasn’t a new type of weapon but the expansion of Syria’s existing chemical program?

Meryl Yourish had already noted that the summer’s explosion probably involved Iran. Israel Matzav provides reasons why he believes that the Israeli target was chemical not nuclear. The Hashmonean doesn’t rule out the nuclear angle but concludes

Channel 10 reports local area hospitals had to treat many of the injured from the event, among them over a dozen Iranian technicians.. Makes further mention of the Iranian Syrian defense pact signed last year, stipulating one of the key areas of cooperation? The adapting / arming of Syrian Scud arsenals with chemical weapons.

(Emphasis mine.)

Could it be then that Krauthammer’s overall analysis is correct even is one detail is wrong? Iran is ratcheting up tensions in order to be able to complete its nuclear program. However, the WMD in the picture are not nuclear but chemical. I realize that neither Israeli nor American officials need to disabuse journalists of their mistaken speculations. However, why aren’t these reporters tying the Israeli strike to the chemical explosion?

And was PM Olmert’s expression of admiration for Syria meant as a taunt?

UPDATE: More at Memeorandum.

UPDATE II: via Small Wars Journal – Con Coughlin’s reading of the situation is alarming.

But judging from the small scraps of information that have emerged, it would be fair to conclude that a new axis of evil is under construction, with Syria assuming Iraq’s place. But unlike Iraq, Syria has well-documented links to the pariah regimes in North Korea and Teheran, and is cooperating with them on a range of projects, from the acquisition of long-range ballistic missiles to the development of chemical and nuclear weapons. The failure to find ready-to-use stockpiles of WMD in Iraq following Saddam’s overthrow may have seriously undermined the coalition’s justification for invading Iraq, but no such doubts exist about Syria’s capability. Even before the Israeli raid, Syria had been identified by a number of intelligence and government agencies as possessing the largest and most advanced chemical weapons capability in the Middle East. Moreover, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, Syria has the delivery systems to make them a palpable threat.

UPDATE III: Buzztracker 1, 2, 3.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

israel, syria, iran, chemical weapons.